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The streaming service that is to ViacomCBS what HBO Max is to WarnerMedia is now available. In this article, I will show you The best 10 Movies To Watch On Paramount Plus.
The corporation (and the studio from which the streamer gets its name) is piling up its collection online. CBS All Access, which it is replacing, is no longer available. Sure, it’s another streamer, and yes, it has an at the end of its name. But hear us out: while Paramount is the new kid on the block, it’s a big thing. For $9.99 a month with the ad-free tier or $4.99 for advertising, you get “2,500 movie titles,” not to mention the deluge of TV series that are coming along for the journey.
It might be difficult to filter through the Comedy Central Roasts, stand-up specials, and unending documentaries. But don’t worry, we’re here to filter through it all and identify the best of the best—and we’re updating every month. The wealth of dramatic masterpieces, martial arts films, Star Trek entries, and lost favorites visit Paramount+ worthwhile, especially given its modest price point.
Here are the 10 best Movies To Watch On Paramount Plus right now:
10. Jackass Forever
On paper, Jackass Forever is identical to every other long-gap nostalgia sequel/revival being utilized to prop up different streaming platforms or the shaky theater experience. It arrives 11 years and changes after the second sequel to a film based on (and very similar to) a TV series, brings back as many of its core actors as possible for more of the same, and even cycles back to revisit particular moments from prior chapters in certain cases. Like previous installments, Jackass Forever begins with a highly staged action sequence that appears to be intended to waste the remaining budget money on a larger-scale representation of the project’s grody humor. It’s Jackass all over again.
Two variables aid Jackass Forever in mitigating and then transcending this on-trend sameness. One is the long-lasting nature of Jackass, which consists of ringleader Johnny Knoxville and different skater-adjacent goofballs executing a range of stunts and pranks that blur the boundary between basic sketch comedy and sophisticated geek show. The second component is likewise related to lifespan. Allow any movie or TV show to run long enough, and it will become, at least in part, about its age, and although Jackass isn’t too emotional about how long these guys have been in one other’s and our lives, it is inevitably conscious of that fact.
Knoxville’s hair is a distinguishing mussed gray in several sequences, while Steve-O brandishes and/or retrieves his artificial front teeth many times (“They’re dropping like flies,” he chuckles semi-ruefully). Knoxville joked in an early scene about the camera needing to avoid capturing his bald place. Spike Jonze, a longstanding collaborator who only infrequently appears on-screen, hurries on with some spray paint to cover everything up. These guys are well into their forties, yet they’re still startling each other with taser zaps, engaging in everyone-losses slapstick competitions, and using each other as bike ramp supports. As the adage goes, this is a feature, not a bug.
That friendliness goes a long way: More casual viewers’ reactions to which antics are laugh-out-loud amusing and which are abjectly horrific may vary, and the rickety carnival rollercoaster ride works better when the other passengers—whether fellow audience members or on-screen talent—are screaming and laughing in equal measure. Knoxville, for one, feels more like a host than ever, stepping into the melee for key moments, including a rousing curtain call for his finale. He’s been terrific in fiction films, but he’s never been more at ease than while presiding over this specific sort of mayhem. He emcees every Jackass film as if he might never do it again—an implicit menace that lurks greater than ever over this one.
After all, continuing this series as a Richard Linklater or 7 Up-style records of comic performance art may not be physically viable. However, the word “forever” is right there in the title. —Hassenger, Jesse
- Year: 2022
- Director: Jeff Tremaine
- Stars: Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Danger Ehren, Wee Man, Preston Lacy, Zach Holmes, Jasper Dolphin, Rachel Wolfson, Sean McInerney
- Rating: R
- Runtime: 96 minutes
9. Office Space: Movies To Watch On Paramount Plus
Great humor nearly always has a dark heart. (The inverse is also true of great horror: it nearly always veers dangerously close to comedy.) However, this makes sense: Laughter is our reaction to bizarre and unexpected paradoxes; comedy requires darkness to thrive. Mike Judge, the writer/director of Office Space, is fully aware of this. His comedy is about the lowest, saddest schmucks on the corporate ladder (to whom 99 percent of us can identify) who generally feel dead within and seek solace in Kung Fu movies and cheap beer. It’s an issue as ancient as capitalism itself: Most of us are dissatisfied, not doing what we want, feeling our dreams slipping us more and more with each passing day.
The protagonist, Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), seeks a subversive pleasure: He wants to accomplish nothing since he has no source of societal stress (unlike, for instance, in The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock). And, apart from being a funny antithesis to a slew of predictable, cookie-cutter hyperactive hero-protagonists, his needs feel completely authentic, which is exactly what the corporate rat race deserves in an anti-hero. The do-gooder has been supplanted by the do-nothing. It certainly helps that Judge has assembled a cast that is completely on board with his tone. They transform caricature into depth and a cartoon into real life. —Harold Brodie & Co.
- Year: 1999
- Director: Mike Judge
8. Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
Mike Judge was at the pinnacle of his talents in the mid to late 1990s, when he was juggling Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, and producing Office Space. Beavis and Butthead Do America is the unusual feature-length version of a TV show that is better than the source material, despite the removal of the music video commentary that was often the funniest part of the MTV series. A larger budget resulted in the greatest animation ever connected with Beavis and Butthead, while the increased length of the film allowed Judge and his co-writer Joe Stillman to take the show’s cultural satire into deeper and wider-ranging areas. It also includes Robert Stack’s strongest animated performance since he was allowed to swear in the Transformers film. —Martin, Garrett
- Year: 1996
- Director: Mike Judge
- Stars: Mike Judge, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Robert Stack, Cloris Leachman
- Rating: PG-13
- Runtime: 80 minutes
7. Glory: Movies To Watch On Paramount Plus
Although Matthew Broderick plays Col. Robert Gould Shaw, Denzel Washington (Pvt. Trip), Morgan Freeman (Sgt. Maj. John Rawlins), Andre Braugher (Cpl. Thomas Searles), and Jimi Kennedy share the spotlight (Pvt. Jupiter Sharts). These performers provide remarkable performances as soldiers of the Union army’s first all-black regiment during the Civil War, with Washington going on to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1990. Rather than concentrating on the apparent North versus.
Glory follows the soldiers as they battle Northern racism and their notions of what it means to be Black, and what it means to be Black in an army where they are virtually never viewed as equals—despite fighting on the same “side” as their white colleagues. Glory is one of the most important films not just about the Civil War, but about America’s eternally complicated history of racism and the black pride that persists in spite, on the battlefield and beyond. It has a hauntingly beautiful score and some of the most memorable war scenes directed by Edward Zwick. —Sherry M. Houston.
- Year: 1989
- Director: Edward Zwick
- Stars: Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes, Morgan Freeman, Matthew Broderick
- Rating: R
- Runtime: 122 minutes
6. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Don Siegel’s film is the first of several adaptations of Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers, and while it lacks some of the more stomach-churningly strange sights of Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake (such as that man-faced dog! ), it more than makes up for it with solid performances and its uniquely bright, complacent portrayal of human society being destroyed from within. As many others have pointed out since the film’s initial release, it’s the ultimate Red Scare-era parable for the coming conflict of East vs. West, emotionless collectivist vs. passionate individualist cultures, tapping into the simmering fear that the nation’s very identity was being undermined by outsiders.
The fact that assimilations and “pod people” constructions occur while we sleep simply adds to the metaphor, emphasizing the necessity for continual, unwavering awareness. Of course, these themes have made Invasion of the Body Snatchers brutally relevant in every period in American history when bigotry is strong, including now. With the country embroiled in yet another cultural war centered on often-racist claims of “un-American” conduct, there has never been a better moment to rewatch the film than right now. —James Vorel
- Year: 1956
- Director: Don Siegel
- Stars: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter
- Runtime: 80 minutes
5. Interstellar: Movies To Watch On Paramount Plus
Christopher Nolan doesn’t normally play with emotion, whether he’s producing superhero pictures or blockbuster puzzle boxes. However, Interstellar is a nearly three-hour homage to the linking power of love. It’s also his endeavor to replicate in 2014 what Stanley Kubrick did in 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Space Odyssey is less of a tribute or homage than it is a challenge to Kubrick’s divisive addition to cinematic culture. Interstellar aims to inspire us with its visceral qualities, crafting a tale about the dormant great American spirit of creativity. It’s an audacious ode to ambition. The film opens in a not-too-distant future in which drought, blight, and dust storms have pummeled the earth into a regressively agricultural culture. The Apollo missions are referred to in textbooks as a fraud, and
This is a world where hope has died, spacecraft lie on shelves collecting dust, and former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is outraged. He’s long-accepted his fate, but he’s still depressed at humanity’s incapacity to look beyond its cosmic limits. However, Cooper becomes involved with a group of underground NASA scientists led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) who intend to send a small crew through a wormhole to study three possibly livable worlds to ensure the human race’s future existence. However, the picture works as a visual tour of the cosmos rather than as a plot.
The film’s pro-NASA optimism is inspiring, and on some level, that homage to human achievement keeps the entire story afloat. But no amount of scientific objectivity can compensate for the weight of poetic repetition and love cliches. —Crump, Andy
- Year: 2014
- Director: Christopher Nolan
4. Election: Movies To Watch On Paramount Plus
Tom Perrotta writes novels that peel back the veneer of polite and “civilized” mid-American suburban life to reveal it for what it is: a Starbucks-in jungle where the most reptilian impulses of human nature can strike at any time to dismantle the weakest members of the pack, or at the very least flirt with pure narcissistic and hedonistic behavior. Indeed, two great films based on his work highlight this thematic connection: in Todd Field’s Little Children, the sexual indiscretions of small-town characters are narrated like an old-school National Geographic documentary, and in Alexander Payne’s Election, the soundtrack blares with a screeching, angry tribal chant whenever a character feels slighted, preparing for an attack to socially destroy an enemy.
During the election to appoint the new student body president, Perrotta and Payne’s story follows a schism between a high school teacher, Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), who isn’t self-aware enough to realize how much of a selfish prick he truly is, and a student, Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), the embodiment of blind and ruthless ambition. Underneath this basic narrative lies a precise and snappy analysis of the extent to which anyone could go on the route to success to preserve their fragile ego while stabbing countless people in the back. Witherspoon’s now-iconic portrayal of Tracy Flick is the personification of that person we’ve all met who would do and say anything to go ahead in life.
- Year: 1999
- Director: Alexander Payne
- Stars: Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein
- Rating: NR
- Runtime: 102 minutes
3. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
There are several reasons why SpongeBob SquarePants has remained popular and relevant for more than two decades. Part of it is due to SpongeBob (Tom Kenny), Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke), and the whole people of their world’s eternal cheerfulness and craziness. The characters are self-referential, consistent with their distinguishing characteristics, and the writers have always produced a duality of experience: silliness for children and a stealthy ascendance of wit that immediately appeals to the adult viewers. To function, the form in which the comedy is served must have all of it present. Tim Hill (who also wrote the original SpongeBob SquarePants Movie in 2004) recognizes this in this first all-3D presentation.
Hill and his team of artists—including Mikros Image, which is responsible f